I Want to Turn Now to Peter Golenbock. Peter Is the Author of Many, Many Books on Sports
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BEYOND THE BOOK A WINNING SEASON? IT’S TIME TO TAKE SPORTSWRITING SERIOUSLY KENNEALLY: I want to turn now to Peter Golenbock. Peter is the author of many, many books on sports. Most recently a novel, actually, 7: The Mickey Mantle Novel, and the other book titles have included Wrigleyville, Wild, High and Tight: The Life of Billy Martin, Bums, and the New York Times bestsellers, Dynasty, The Bronx Zoo, written with Sparky Lyle, Number 1 with Billy Martin, and Balls with Craig Nettles. Peter lives in St. Petersburg, Florida. Welcome to the panel, Peter. GOLENBOCK: Thank you very much. (applause) KENNEALLY: I was intrigued to learn that you began your own sportswriting career as a correspondent from a certain small town in New Hampshire. And it was already, though, a kind of foreshadowing of the direction your writing would take. Tell us about that. GOLENBOCK: Well, I didn’t know it. I mean, I was a freshman at Dartmouth College, and I started working for The Dartmouth, which was the campus newspaper. And I guess I was pretty good at it, because very soon they asked me if I would be the campus correspondent to the New York Times. And they were paying me $5 an article. You’d write two paragraphs and a box score, and they said you can write about any sport you want to. And for crying out loud, they had dozens and dozens of different sports. I thought, boy, I’m going to get rich. And I was making a good $30 a week doing that. I was one of the wealthiest guys on campus. KENNEALLY: That was good walking-around money in those days. But there was also a figure on campus who became important to you who did relate to the future of your career. GOLENBOCK: Yeah. It’s kind of amazing how it works like that. When I was a kid, I discovered a book called The New York Yankees by Frank Graham. And I have no idea why this book meant so much to me, but I must have read it a hundred times. Because in this book, he had conversations with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. And I think the book came out in like 1946, something like that. And this was the history of the Yankees. Frank Graham was this wonderful sportswriter. One of the guys who wrote conversations, as opposed to just facts. I was more – I was always interested in the people more so than exactly what they did. Though if you were a Yankee fan, you knew they were going to win. And so the athletic director at Dartmouth was a fellow by name of Red Rolfe, who turned out to be – he was a third baseman for those Yankees during the ’30s and the ’40s. And when he was there, he was sort of on his way out. I mean, everybody wanted him to leave. All the coaches wanted a new guy, wanted new blood. Red was kind of a pain in the ass. The baseball coach wanted him gone. But to me, he was like a god. I was like a 16-year old freshman at Dartmouth College, and this was Red Rolfe, who had played ball with Lou Gehrig and played ball with Joe DiMaggio. And it was a chance for me to sit with him and ask him about these guys. And so I became sort of a pet of Red’s, because here was this kid who actually cared about him and cared about his career. And I didn’t realize it, but Red Rolfe was the first of probably 400 interviews that I’ve had with former Major League players. It was magical, for me. KENNEALLY: That’s terrific, the way life really began that early for you – GOLENBOCK: (inaudible) amazing. KENNEALLY: – in your career. And it would continue that way – tell us about how you pitched your first book idea, and that then became the bestseller. GOLENBOCK: Well, also unique kind of a thing. After Dartmouth, I went to NYU law school, where I spent most of my time hanging out with the Knicks and the Rangers and the Yankees and the Jet and the Giants. I mean, I was not a very good law student, and I knew just enough to get by. And I got my first job working for Friedman and Fishman. And I lasted there six weeks, because they handed me this stack of cases and they said, OK, we want you to handle these. And in six of them, the statute of the limitations had run. Now, that’s a six-year statute of limitations where if you let the statute run, your client cannot get into court. And you can be disbarred for that. So either Friedman or Fishman, one of the two of them, said here’s this pile of cases. And I brought them back to him and said, hey, the statute run on these six cases. And he said to me, OK, call these people up and tell them why they don’t have a case. And I said I quit. And that was it. And then I went to the New York Times, and I got myself a job at Prentice Hall as a journalist, writing about President Nixon’s wage and price controls. And this was the summer of 1972, and I discovered the whole thing was kind of a fraud because all the prices were allowed to go up, but none of the wages. So sort of Republican duplicity that perhaps we’ve seen before. At any rate, after six weeks, I found a trade book catalog from Prentice Hall. And I thought to myself, well, I can write a book better than the stuff I’m seeing in this catalogue. And I ran downstairs just to knock on the door of the trade book editor’s office, and it was such a small operation that he didn’t even have a secretary. And so he says come in, and I went in. And I told him, look, during the 16 years between 1949 and 1964, the Yankees won 14 pennants and nine world championships, this would make a great book. And not only that – every year, they had more than a million in attendance, so that’s 16 million people. And if I can sell books to just 1% of those people, we’ll have a bestseller. And he says, OK, I’ll give you a contract. KENNEALLY: And that – GOLENBOCK: And that’s what happened. And then – and it doesn’t happen very often. And actually, I told that story to the Bergen Record in the first article about this particular book after it came out, and Dincheko (sp?) received 60, 70 book proposals. And they were all terrible, so – KENNEALLY: He didn’t take any of them. GOLENBOCK: Yeah. Right. KENNEALLY: Well, that was a wonderful stroke of luck for you. But then something happened – you worked on the book for almost a year, researching the record of those years, and determined that that was hardly going to be enough? GOLENBOCK: Well, I went to Yankee Stadium, and the Yankees – Bob Fishel was the PR guy, and Marty Appel, who’s still a close friend of mine, was his assistant. And they said, sure, you can do whatever research you want, we’re got all these newspaper articles in our files, and you’re welcome to hang with us. And I became sort of an unpaid member of the Yankees during the 1972-73 season. Steinbrenner came along right after that and fired everybody. But this was before everybody got fired. And so they let me hang around. And after I had compiled all my information with which I was going to write this book, it occurred to me quite in the pit of my stomach that none of this information was worth a damn. I hadn’t quite formulated it. But if you’re going to write a book, the idea is you’re going to write something that somebody’s never read before. You better give them something new, or it’s not worth doing it. And so I went back to Dincheko and I said look, I need – he gave me $2500 to start. So at the end of the year, I went back to him and I said, look, I need to interview these guys. Will you give me another $2500, and he said yes. If he had said no, my career was over. I would have owed him $2500, and I don’t know what I would have done. But he said yes. So he gave me $2500 – I started going around the country interviewing. I started with Jim Constanti and ended up with Mantle and Maris, and Clete Boyer and Whitey Ford, and everybody who played on the Yankees, I went to see them. Interviewed them all. I had to go back for another $2500, and yet a fourth $2500, and each time, the guy gave me the money. And that enabled me to finish the book. KENNEALLY: Well, tell us about the first meeting with Mickey, and – he told you something that must have struck you, and I’m imagining became the seed that got planted that wound up being this new book. GOLENBOCK: Yeah, without a doubt. KENNEALLY: Tell us about that. GOLENBOCK: Mickey had – I’d called Mickey. The Yankees were wonderful to me, just wonderful. And they gave me access to all the telephone numbers of all their former Yankees.